Your guide to becoming a DevOps engineer starts with these six online courses

The DevOps approach has helped businesses all over the world speed up their development processes, deploy more frequently, and ensure a high standard of quality with every release. In other words? Be more successful.

In fact, businesses that hire for DevOps skills can often see a boost in deployment frequency and fewer failures. Despite this tremendous boon, the companies that have DevOps engineers on staff are still in the minority. While that’s bad news for them, it might be good news for you if you’re considering a career in this booming field. The demand is high. The competition is low. It’s time to take the leap.

To get you started, we’ve laid out six crucial DevOps competencies — first defined by The New Stack — that you’ll need to get your foot in the door. And once you know your trajectory, you can start training towards it with the Pay What You Want DevOps Bundle, $834 worth of online instruction for the price of your choosing. Here are the skills:

1. Collaboration

DevOps was born out of the historically terrible working relationships between development and IT operations teams. But DevOps practitioners consider it crucial to collaborate with not just IT, but multiple teams across an organization, from QA teams to business teams. If you want to make a dent in a company’s productivity as a DevOps engineer, you best learn to tear down the silos and make inroads all across the office.

2. Automation

A crucial part of the DevOps ethos is simplifying and streamlining the end-to-end development process with the help of automation. Two of the most commonly used DevOps tools for aiding automation are Docker and Jenkins, so be sure to bone up on both in preparation for your DevOps job hunt.

3. Continuous integration

The larger a dev team grows, the more likely it is that defects will be introduced into a large code base, and the harder it becomes to identify and fix those mistakes. Continuous integration solves for that by creating a “security checkpoint” wherein any change must undergo immediate testing and reporting, every time. If you want to “integrate” with your new DevOps teammates, you should get used to providing thorough documentation and rapid feedback on any contribution, and familiarize yourself with the tools used to build continuous integration pipelines (like the aforementioned Jenkins).

4. Continuous testing

Remember when we mentioned collaboration with QA teams was a tenet of DevOps? Continuous testing is why. Thorough testing can’t be done in a vacuum. More errors can be caught early when developers double-check their own code before sending to QA, provide test data sets, and help to configure testing environments. Because of this, successful DevOps engineers must be meticulous and willing to offer assistance to test engineers whenever possible.

5. Continuous delivery

Due to the continuous integration and testing practices inherent in a DevOps workflow, all code should be in a consistently deployable state during any given step of the process. This vastly reduces the complexity of an individual release and thus allows much higher release frequency. In other words, a steady stream of reliable, iterative updates, instead of one unwieldy update that’s only been tested on the way out the door. The practice of continuous delivery calls for engineers who can move quickly and finish what they start without sacrificing accuracy.

6. Continuous monitoring

Even though DevOps enhances overall quality and lowers the rate of release failure, nobody is perfect. Glitches are inevitable — the process actually counts on it. Continuous monitoring aims to find and fix errors in real time. Once the underlying cause of an error is understood, that information can be used to monitor development and other steps in the process, filtering out errors long before they can make it to production. A savvy DevOps engineer should always be ready to correct mistakes and know how to spot them in all other stages as well.

If you think you’ve got what it takes to put this DevOps theory into practice, grab the Pay What You Want DevOps Bundle now.